Page 66 of Meet Me in the Garden

“Have you shown anywhere?” she asks.

“Me? Definitely not. I just started up again, after a long time.”

“My friend Joan is also very good,” she says. “She’s had a few small shows. She’s up in San Francisco. She locks herself away in her studio for weeks sometimes. But you can’t do that, can you?”

“No. Sometimes I wish I could, though. Or not quite. I wish I could stop time for a week. I don’t want everything to happen without me. But I want a million more hours to work.”

“I feel what you could do, given a million hours.” She smiles at me and scans the yard with her sharp eyes. I try to see what she sees. Today, its wildness pleases me, but I can’t tell what she thinks. “This is nice,” she says. “I’m enjoying myself. I’ll admit that most of my friends become terribly boring after they have children. Suddenly all the things that oncemade them interesting vanish. Like amnesia. They wake up mothers and forget all of their opinions.”

“Am I different?”

“Well, I didn’t know you before, did I?”

I sip my drink, consider it. “I am changed. Certainly. But I was only eighteen. I don’t know how many of my opinions were even formed yet. I was still in New Orleans, and there was the war. I was living with my mother and my sisters. A child, almost. It’s more like my path was set in a certain direction because I had a baby, and I’ve had to figure out who I am, and how to be, while following it.”

She’s watching me closely. “You sound like you might have preferred a different one.”

A sound escapes me, bitter, surprising. I say, “Women like Carol have to make a choice. I’ve made the safer one.” And then I can’t look at her, stand suddenly and turn to the door, overcome by what I’ve just shared. How fast and easily it slipped out, how dangerous it feels. Like I’ve risked everything. “I’m getting a cigarette. Want anything?”

Her voice is calm when she says, “I’d take a cigarette, sure.”

“All right.”

Inside the kitchen, I open my hands flat, press hard on the countertop. She doesn’t know my last name, doesn’t know a thing about me. No connection to my sisters, nothing to do with the plant. She saw the book under my arm. It’s why she talked to me in the first place. She was glad that Therese and Carol ended up together. I take cigarettes from the coffee table and go back outside. She’s still there where I left her, turning to me when I appear in the doorway.

We fall into friendship like people fall into love. A magnetism to it. We meet after work for drinks, on the weekends for gallery shows and films. Nearly everywhere we go she knows someone and someone knows her, and still, it’s me who she calls to go with her to the opening of an artist she likes, to try out a new bar she’s heard about. We read Gwendolyn Brooks and Walt Whitman. We hunt obscure novels at Pickwick’s, criticizethe magazines, browse the shops in Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Plenty of unspoken rules there as to who is welcome in and who isn’t, but by Elise’s side there’s never a question, not even a second glance. We act as though we own the world and no one challenges us. One day I see a set of six blush-pink dessert cups in a shop window, frivolous, expensive beyond reason.

“I want them,” I say.

“Get them,” she says. “They’re absolutely darling.”

That night at home, alone, the children still away and Felix on the train, I unwrap the brown paper that protects them and line them up on a shelf. Milk glass and delicate, rippled along the edges.Look at your life, they seem to say.What a strange and wondrous thing it’s becoming.

A few days later, I’m outside in my yard when a honk comes from the street and her voice calls my name. I open the gate to find her wrestling a paint-splattered easel from her car.

“There’s more,” she says. “We’ll need to make a couple trips.” After the easel we go back for long thin pieces of wood and a heaping armful of linen sheets. “I cleaned out my closet. Time to get you painting bigger. I did this with Joan once. Let’s see how much I remember.”

We build a frame, around two by three feet. I use my sewing scissors to cut the linen and we fold one side over the frame, set a staple in the center of the wood.

“Now we’re going to work our way to the corners,” Elise says. She pulls too hard and a small rip appears near the staple. “Shit. Okay. It can probably withstand a little tear but not much more. You try.” I pull, but it’s too loose now, puckered when we turn it over. “God damn it to hell,” she mutters, and I laugh. We start again with a new piece of linen. We mess up again, we swear like sailors. And then, finally, it looks right.

“Moment of truth,” she says.

“How can we know?”

“You flick it.”

I do. The linen bounces back with a twang, like a drum. We’ve done it.

And then it’s August and the children come back, leaping from the train into my arms and I can’t get enough of them, keep kissing theirfaces, make them pancakes in the morning, serve them ice cream in the new pink dessert cups, listen to their stories of New Orleans, imagine them on the streets I used to walk. Crepe myrtle and humidity and jazz. Hattie doesn’t live with her parents anymore, so Clément and Nathalie have their own rooms at the Laurent house—Clément in Cyril’s old one and Nathalie in Hattie’s, a pain under my ribs picturing them tucked into those beds, waking to Mama Laurent wrapping them in hugs, walking them to the refrigerator saying, “What you want, my babies?” Still hugging them as she says it, like she did for me during the short time that I lived under her roof.

“Incredible,” I say, marveling. “You two have whole lives of your own there.”

Elise comes around less now that they’re back, but we still meet after work, have long late-night phone calls once the kids are sleeping. She never invites me to her house and I never ask why. Instead, I stretch the phone cord to the kitchen table and we page through the new art magazines, discussing the industry gossip from our separate homes, breaking down the works and the interviews.

“So. The Kessler article,” she says one November night.

I find the page. “‘Nature, Nakedness, and Nihilism,’” I say. “Quite the subtitle. It was fascinating, though. The Renoir is probably too romantic for your taste but it’s one of my favorites. His use oflight.”